Gazzara was born
Biagio Anthony Gazzara in
New York City, the son of
Italian immigrants Angelina (née Cusumano) and
Antonio Gazzara, who was a laborer and carpenter.Gazzara grew up on
New York's tough
Lower East Side; he lived on
East 29th Street and participated in the drama program at
Madison Square Boys and Girls Club located across the street. He later attended New York City's
Stuyvesant High School.
Years later, he said that the discovery of his love for acting saved him from a life of crime during his teen years. He went to
City College of New York to study electrical engineering. After two years, he relented. He took classes in acting at the
Dramatic Workshop of
The New School in
New York with the influential
German director
Erwin Piscator and afterward joined the
Actors Studio
Gazzara became well-known in several television series, beginning with
Arrest and Trial, which ran from
1963 to 1964 on
ABC, and the more-successful series
Run for Your Life from
1965 to
1968 on
NBC, in which he played a terminally ill man trying to get the most out of the last two years of his life. For his work in the series, Gazzara received two
Emmy nominations for "
Outstanding Lead Actor in a
Drama Series" and three
Golden Globe nominations for "
Best Performance by an Actor in a
Television Series -
Drama."[5][6]
Contemporary screen credits included
The Young Doctors (
1961),
A Rage to Live (1965),
The Bridge at Remagen (
1969).
Some of the actor's most formidable characters were those he created with his friend
John Cassavetes in the
1970s. They collaborated for the first time on Cassavetes's film
Husbands (
1970), in which he appeared alongside
Peter Falk and Cassavetes himself. In
The Killing of a
Chinese Bookie (
1976) Gazzara took the leading role of the hapless strip-joint owner,
Cosmo Vitelli. A year later, Gazzara starred in yet another Cassavetes-directed movie,
Opening Night, as stage director
Manny Victor, who struggles with the mentally unstable star of his show, played by Cassavetes's wife
Gena Rowlands. Also during this period he was in the
TV mini-series QB VII (co-starring with
Anthony Hopkins 1974), and the films
Capone (
1975),
Voyage of the Damned (1976),
High Velocity (1976), and
Saint Jack (
1979)
.
In the 1980s, Gazzara appeared in several movies, such as
They All Laughed (directed by
Peter Bogdanovich), and in a villainous role in the oft-televised
Patrick Swayze film
Road House, which the actor jokingly said is probably his most-watched performance. He starred with Rowlands in a controversial and critically acclaimed AIDS-themed
TV movie An Early Frost (
1985), for which he received his third
Emmy nomination.
Gazzara appeared in thirty-eight films—many for TV—in the
1990s. He worked with a number of renowned directors, such as the
Coen brothers (
The Big Lebowski),
Spike Lee (
Summer of Sam),
David Mamet (
The Spanish Prisoner),
Walter Hugo Khouri (
Forever),
Todd Solondz (
Happiness),
John Turturro (
Illuminata), and
John McTiernan (
The Thomas Crown Affair).
In his eighties, Gazzara continued to be active. In
2003, he was in the ensemble cast of the experimental film
Dogville, directed by
Lars von Trier of
Denmark and starring
Nicole Kidman, as well as the television film
Hysterical Blindness (he received his first
Emmy Award for his role). Several other projects have recently been completed or are currently in production. In
2005, he played
Agostino Casaroli in the
TV miniseries Pope John Paul II. He completed filming his scenes in the film
The Wait in early
2012.[7]
In addition to acting, Gazzara worked as an occasional television director; his credits include the
Columbo episodes "A
Friend in Deed" (1974) and "
Troubled Waters" (1975). Gazzara was nominated three times for the
Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a
Play—in
1956 for
A Hatful of Rain, in 1975 for the paired short plays
Hughie and
Duet, and in
1977 for a revival of
Who's Afraid of
Virginia Woolf?, opposite
Colleen Dewhurst.Gazzara was diagnosed with throat cancer in
1999. On
February 3, 2012, he died of pancreatic cancer at
Bellevue Hospital Center in New York
- published: 04 Feb 2012
- views: 8145